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201912015 Nalional Geog'aphic Magazine- NGM.com

Mediterranean tuna fleet has been seizing almost double its annuallegal quota.

Mielgo Bregazzi said Ricardo Fuentes & Sons and a French partner bave worked with a Libyan company, Ras el Hillal, to catch giant bluefin in Libyanwaters.
Mielgo Bregazzi said that Seif al Jslam Qaddafi, the son of libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, has a financial interest in Ras el Hillal and bas earned millions of
dollars from the bluefin fishery. Mielgo Bregazzi calculatedthat, for the past fouryears, bluefin fleets netted more than to,ooo tons ofbluefin annuallyin
Libyan waters. Some of the catch is legai und.er quotas for libyan, Spanish, and French boats, but mucb of it appears to be caught illegally.

David Martinez Caiiabate, assistant manager of the Fuentes Group, said the company has "absolutely'' no connection to th.e Qaddafi fa.mily andthat ali
bluefin tuna it catches, buys, or ranches have been legally caught and properly documented with ICCAT and Spanish authorities. He conceded that bluefin
have been overfished, mainly by companiesthat do not ranch tunabut sell the fish soon after nettingthem. Fleets from other countries also catchbluefin
without an ICCAT quota and rancb them illegally, Martinez said. He said mucb of Mielgo Bregazzi's information is "incorrect or, worse, bad intentioned" and
that the Fuentes Group bas supported stricter conservation measures. ''We are more interested than anyone in the future of the tuna," Martinez said. ''We
live offthis resource."

Actually, Li.byan and other Mediterraneanbluefin have so flooded th.e marlret that Japanese companies have stockpiled 20,000 metric tons in giant freezers.
The glut has halved prices for flshermen in the past fewyears, to between three and four dollars a pound. Stili, the value of the bluefin caught annually in
Llòya, then fattened for severa! months, is roughly 400 million dollars on the Japanese market.

"They're slaughtering everything," Mielgo Bregazzi said. "The fish don't stand a chance."

The extent to which giant bluefinfleets flout regulations became evident during a visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily. To give the tuna a
reprieve during peak spawning season, EU and ICCAT rules prolnoit spotter aircraft from flying in June. The regulation is often ignored.

I flew one June morning with Eduardo Domaniewicz, anArgentine-American pilot who bas spotted tuna for French and Italian purse seiners since 2003.
Riding shotgun was Domaniewicz's spotter, Alfonso Consiglio. Theywere combing the waters between Lampedusa and Tunisia, and they were not alone:
Three other spotter aircraft were prowling illegally, relaying tuna sightings to some of the 20 purse seiners in the water below. (After two hours, highwinds
and cboppy seas, which make it difficult both to see and net the bluefin, forced the planes to returnto Lampedusa and Malta.)

Domaniewicz was conflicted. He loved to fly and was well paid. He believed his June flights were legai, because Italy never agreed to the ban. But after three
years of spotting for the bluefm fleet, he was fed up with the uncontrolled fishing. Just before I arrived on Lampedusa, he had watched two purse-seine
fleets net 835,000 pounds (38o,ooo kilograms) ofbluefin, sharing more than two million dollars.

"There is no wayfor the fJ.Sh to escape-everything is high-tech," Domaniewicz said. Speaking of the French purse-seine fishermen he worked for in Libya, he
said, "I am an enviromrumtalist, and I couldn't stand the way theyfished with no care for the quotas. I saw these people taking everything. They catch
wbatever they want. Theyjust see money on the sea. They don't thinkwhat willbe there in ten years."

Alfonso Consiglio, whose family owns a fleet of purse seiners, also is torn. "The price is cheap because more and more tuna are being caught," he said. "My
only weapon is to catch more flsh. It's a vicious circle. If I catch my quota of a thousand tuna, I can't live because the price is very cheap. I want to respect the
quota, butI can't because I need to live. Ifboats of all countries respect the rules, tuna will not be fmished. If only few countries respect th.e rules, and others
don't respect the rules, the fishermanwho respects rules isfmished."

How canthis endless cycle of overfJ.Shingbe stopped? Howcan the world's fleets be prevented from committing ecological and economie suicide by depleting
the oceans ofbluefin tuna, shark, cod, haddock, seabass, halre, red snapper, orange roughy, grouper, grenadier, sturgeon, plaice, rocldish, skate, and other
species?

Experts agree that, first, the world's oceans must be managed as ecosystems, not simply as larders from which the fishing industry can extract protein at wilL
Second, the management councils that oversee fisheries, sucb as ICCAT, long dominated by commerciai fishing interests, must share power with scientists
and conservationists.

Further, governments must cut backthe world's four millionfishing vessels-nearlydouble what is needed to flsh the ocean sustainably-and slashthe
estimated 25 billion dollars in government subsidies bestowed annually on the fJ.Shing industry.

In addition, fisheries agencies will bave to set tough quotas and enforce them. Forgiant bluefinin the Mediterranean, that may mean shuttingdown the
fishery during the spawning season and substantially increasing the minimum catch weight. ICCAT recently failed to decrease quotas significantly or dose

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